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The science of why drivers slow down for Pittsburgh tunnels
The Incline: I brake before tunnels. This is an admission that, as a person new to Pittsburgh, I did not think would cause a scandal. But in a “city of tunnels,” confessing that you are guilty of this particular vehicular sin elicits sighs, groans and exclamations of outrage from people who just moments before were kindly offering you recommendations for good pierogies. That’s not to say that braking for tunnels isn’t a weird point of civic hate-pride: There are Reddit threads. There’s a T-shirt. There’s a song. ... In an effort to defend myself, I contacted Roberta Klatzky.
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Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve
The New York Times: Ask people what’s wrong in American higher education, and you’ll hear about grade inflation. At Harvard a few years ago, a professor complained that the most common grade was an A-. He was quickly corrected: The most common grade at Harvard was an A. Across 200 colleges and universities, over 40 percent of grades were in the A realm. At both four-year and two-year schools, more students receive A’s than any other grade — a percentage that has grown over the past three decades. Among older graduates, figures like these usually elicit a comment involving the words “coddled,” “damn” and “millennials.” But the opposite problem worries me even more: grade deflation.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Development of Inequity Aversion: Understanding When (and Why) People Give Others the Bigger Piece of the Pie Alex Shaw, Shoham Choshen-Hillel, and Eugene M. Caruso It is traditionally believed that, as children age, they come to understand the unfairness of inequality and become less likely to endorse. The authors tested this idea in three studies, in which 4- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and the researchers determined how erasers would be distributed among group members.
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The Upside of a Long Commute? Time to Think
According to a 2011 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it takes the average commuter about 38 minutes to reach their workplace. This means the average commuter spends almost 300 hours each year just getting to and from work. Research has shown that long commutes have a negative impact on many aspects of life, from mental health and blood pressure to divorce rates. Commuting is such a negative experience that, according to a recent analysis conducted by FiveThirtyEight, New Yorkers are willing to shell out an extra $56 a month to cut their commuting time by just one minute.
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Why Do We Forget?
Scientific American: The brain, with its 100 billion neurons, allows us to do amazing things like learn multiple languages, or build things that send people into outer space. Yet despite this astonishing capacity, we routinely can’t remember where we put our keys, we forget why we went to the grocery store, and we fail when trying to recall personal life events. This apparent contradiction in functionality opens up the question of why we forget some things but remember others. Or, more fundamentally, what causes forgetting?
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THE ENDLESS, AND EXPENSIVE, QUEST FOR RARE OBJECTS
The New Yorker: A few months ago, I was invited to speak at a small marketing conference in Chicago. To attract attendees, its organizer promised everyone a one-ounce pour—a sip, more or less—of a cult bourbon called Pappy Van Winkle. Pappy, as it is known to its fans, is so sought after that it’s nearly impossible to find, and, a few days before the conference, word came that the Pappy supplier had fallen through. Luckily, I happened to walk into a Greenwich Village liquor store where two bottles had just arrived. “They’ll be gone by tomorrow,” the clerk said, before naming his price: thirty-five hundred dollars for the pair.
